It’s home to Rogerio Lobo, who believes long-distance, group prayer on behalf of specific infertile women makes them fertile; and who – not surprisingly, given his enthusiasm for the spirit world — is also heavily into ghostwriting his publications.
It’s home to Michelle Warren, MD, M.D. – as she styles herself – reminding all American Lit majors of, well, Major Major Major Major… That extra MD, UD’s guessing, stands for My Double, the ghostwriter who actually pens the articles to which Warren attaches her name. Like Lobo, she’s way into ghostwriting.
And it’s home to Brass Balls Leon, swaggering bad boy cardiologist who’s always in the principal’s office for something, but never seems — this is true of his colleagues Lobo and Warren, too — to rise to the level of anything Columbia University would consider punishing. Here’s his latest thing:
[Two Senators have sent Columbia University a letter in which they write that] Leon might have failed to tell Columbia about significant amounts in consulting fees, speaking fees and other payments.
“Dr. Leon appears to have failed to report millions of dollars that he has received in outside income,” their letter stated.
… It was not immediately clear how many new disclosures were in the letter. For example, several years ago, Dr. Leon publicly discussed the largest single payment cited in it: $6.9 million he received from Edwards Life- sciences in connection with its purchase in 2004 of a heart valve company he helped found.
Dr. Leon is currently the national co-lead investigator for a major clinical trial involving the device, which was that company’s main product. Under the Edwards purchase agreement, he can qualify to receive additional payments if certain landmarks involving the product are reached. In a BusinessWeek article in 2006, he said that he had donated his rights to those payments to a school, which he declined then to identify.
… [I]ndustry critics have long pointed to Dr. Leon … as emblematic of the tangled financial relationships that often exist between academic researchers and medical device makers. In published interviews, Dr. Leon had denied allegations of conflicts of interest.
… In December, after the start of the lawmakers’ investigation, Dr. Leon filed amended disclosure statements with Columbia University covering the period in question. Also, Columbia told the senators in April that it had adopted new conflict-of-interest guidelines that were “in line with many best practices” recommended by professional medical organizations.
But the lawmakers’ letter said that their review suggested that Dr. Leon, even in his amended filings, had not reported all the payments he had received from companies that included Boston Scientific, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic and the Volcano Corporation.
UD doesn’t call him Brass Balls for nothing.
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[UD is very grateful to a reader for
sending her the most recent BBL
installment.]
She loves, in writing this blog, to encounter old familiar names, the names of people she wrote about on University Diaries years and years ago, when she was just a tyke and didn’t know that, you know, once a shit, always a shit.
For instance, when UD was still in diapers she wrote about a professor at Columbia University named Rogerio Lobo. It was June 8, 2004, to be exact, and here’s that post:
Intercessional Insemination at Columbia University
Wow! Psychology Today excitedly revealed, back in 2002, the results of a Columbia University study which showed that if people pray for infertile women undergoing in vitro treatment, the women they pray for double their chances of getting pregnant. “Women who were prayed for had a 50 percent pregnancy rate, compared with a 26 percent success rate among those for whom no one prayed.”
We’re not talking here about your local priest or your canasta partner kneeling in the neighborhood church — in this “amazing” study, total strangers thousands of miles away from the Korean women involved (none of the women were told they were experimental subjects) prayed to anonymous photos of them….
And that wasn’t all! “Instead of merely having a group of people pray for the women attempting to get pregnant,” a scientist who reviewed the experiment remarked, “the study had one group doing that, a second group praying to help the first group, and a third group praying that ‘God’s will or desire be fulfilled for the prayer participants’ in the first two groups.” Kind of a chain letter thing.
This impressive protocol and its stunning results blew Roger [sometimes rendered Rogerio] Lobo, chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, right out of the uterine sac. “The results were so highly significant they weren’t even borderline. We spent time deciding if it was even publishable because we couldn’t explain it.”
But publish it they did, in the eminent Journal of Reproductive Medicine, and there it sat amid swelling media coverage, until various scientific oversight agencies took a look at it.
At which point the swelling went down. Efforts to talk to the three principals about it have not gone well. “One of the authors,” writes an observer, “has left the university and refuses to comment, another now claims to have not actually participated in the study and also refuses to comment [that‘d be Lobo, who now says he just put his name on the study -- a common and scandalous scientific practice that no one finds scandalous], and another is on his way to federal prison for fraud.”
That’d be veteran conman Daniel P. Wirth, about to spend five years in jail for too many crimes to mention here. Wirth has no medical degree, but did purchase a diploma mill masters in parapsychology, spiritual healing, and therapeutic touch. Before the pregnancy study, Wirth’s research involved amputating salamander limbs and then waving his hands over the salamanders to make their limbs grow back.
Five years later, Lobo remains a Columbia University professor in excellent standing.
And he’s back in the news!
He’s one of four ghost-ridden professors singled out by Senator Grassley in a letter to NIH asking about the practice among grant recipients.
To sample Lobo’s protoplasmic praise for Wyeth hormones, click on Lobo.tif when you get to the Index of Ghostwriting (good name for a novel).
Here’s a comment from one of the readers at theheart.org:
How curious. Some leopards really don’t ever change their spots. Rogerio Lobo embarrassed Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons once before and did it big time.
He put his name as lead author on a widely touted “study” — that he had no part in conducting — to help get it published. The now infamous study published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine — claimed remote Christian prayers doubled the fertility rate of women being treated for infertility in South Korea. Although the bogus study is a scientific embarrassment, the journal editor refused to retract it or print a substantial correction, despite the mushrooming scandal, which included the arrest and conviction of Daniel Wirth, the con-artist author who cooked up the study.
Wirth turned out to be a lawyer, and psychic investigator, and life-long con artist. In 1994, he was pleaded guilty to one of the numerous counts for fraud he was charged with and was sentenced to 5 years in a federal penitentiary.
The second author, Dr. Kwang Cha has also been accused of misconduct, including a serious charge of plagiarism.
When Columbia found itself facing an NIH ethics violation investigation (because the infertility study involved women without their informed consent) the school got Lobo to admit that he put his name on the paper as lead author even though he didn’t know about the study until after it had been completed! That was the school’s defense against the human subjects ethics violation charge. Lobo and Columbia then stonewalled, refusing to answer questions about the tawdry affair. Following the scandal, Lobo was no longer the head of Columbia’s Ob/Gyn Department.
Now here he is again, apparently putting his name on “research” papers he never wrote in order to help get them published.
I don’t really blame the leopard not changing his spots. I blame the zoo keepers at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, who circled the circus wagons to protect him six years ago.
Yes. Call him a leopard. Call him a shit. But what do you call a university that keeps a man like Rogerio Lobo on its faculty?
Leopardshit, I guess.
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We have the Index of Ghostwriting thanks to lawsuits against Wyeth (I usually rail against Our Litigious Culture, but I’ve become convinced, in following the pharma industry, that some lawsuits are indispensable) and thanks to the people behind this blog, PLoS Medicine, who got the documents released. Excerpts from their editorial announcing the publication of the ghostwriting documents on their site:
While editors, medical schools, and universities have turned a blind eye to, or at the least failed to tackle head-on the pervasive presence of ghostwriting, drug companies and medical education and communication companies have built a vast and profitable ghostwriting industry. Recruitment of academic “authors” appears, within some academic circles, to have come to be considered acceptable…
How did we get to the point that falsifying the medical literature is acceptable? How did an industry whose products have contributed to astounding advances in global health over the past several decades come to accept such practices as the norm? Whatever the reasons, as the pipeline for new drugs dries up and companies increasingly scramble for an ever-diminishing proportion of the market in “me-too” drugs, the medical publishing and pharmaceutical industries and the medical academic community have become locked into a cycle of mutual dependency, in which truth and a lack of bias have come to be seen as optional extras…
Intercessional Insemination at Columbia University
Wow! Psychology Today excitedly revealed, back in 2002, the results of a Columbia University study which showed that if people pray for infertile women undergoing in vitro treatment, the women they pray for double their chances of getting pregnant. “Women who were prayed for had a 50 percent pregnancy rate, compared with a 26 percent success rate among those for whom no one prayed.”
We’re not talking here about your local priest or your canasta partner kneeling in the neighborhood church — in this “amazing” study, total strangers thousands of miles away from the Korean women involved (none of the women were told they were experimental subjects) prayed to anonymous photos of them….
And that wasn’t all! “Instead of merely having a group of people pray for the women attempting to get pregnant,” a scientist who reviewed the experiment remarked, “the study had one group doing that, a second group praying to help the first group, and a third group praying that ‘God’s will or desire be fulfilled for the prayer participants’ in the first two groups.” Kind of a chain letter thing.
This impressive protocol and its stunning results blew Roger [sometimes rendered Rogerio] Lobo, chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, right out of the uterine sac. “The results were so highly significant they weren’t even borderline. We spent time deciding if it was even publishable because we couldn’t explain it.”
But publish it they did, in the eminent Journal of Reproductive Medicine, and there it sat amid swelling media coverage, until various scientific oversight agencies took a look at it.
At which point the swelling went down. Efforts to talk to the three principals about it have not gone well. “One of the authors,” writes an observer, “has left the university and refuses to comment, another now claims to have not actually participated in the study and also refuses to comment [that‘d be Lobo, who now says he just put his name on the study -- a common and scandalous scientific practice that no one finds scandalous], and another is on his way to federal prison for fraud.”
That’d be veteran conman Daniel P. Wirth, about to spend five years in jail for too many crimes to mention here. Wirth has no medical degree, but did purchase a diploma mill masters in parapsychology, spiritual healing, and therapeutic touch. Before the pregnancy study, Wirth’s research involved amputating salamander limbs and then waving his hands over the salamanders to make their limbs grow back.
Dr. Lobo was “very well respected” before the paper came out, commented one reviewer. “How he got hooked into this is a mystery.”
To which I can only reply by quoting Madonna’s song, “Like a Prayer” –
Life is a mystery…
Just like a prayer, your voice can take me there
Just like a muse to me, you are a mystery
Just like a dream, you are not what you seem…
